


it's still a feeling

by rollingsreliable



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-02
Updated: 2012-12-02
Packaged: 2017-11-20 03:26:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/580787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rollingsreliable/pseuds/rollingsreliable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry's a smitten kid, and Caroline can't help but be charmed by him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's still a feeling

**Author's Note:**

> I know the timeline here is totally screwed, so just abandon whatever you know about how/when Caroline and Harry hooked up.

He’s nervous, and it’s cute. That’s what she’s going to remember later. He’s nervous, and that’s how it starts.

She had seen him the year before, of course – hadn’t everyone? She had seen his charming audition, heard his surprisingly big, if untrained, voice, watched him cry and flirt and dance (well, sort of). He was still just a pretty little child then, all curls and big eyes, his limbs just slightly too long. He’d won her over (she was only human) because he was unapologetic about everything, and not just because he was beautiful and sixteen and on television. He seemed comfortable, even when he missed a note or danced terribly. He seemed present.

And now, seventeen, and filled out and styled and growing past his prettiness into something sharper – and scared as shit. She can’t help herself; she’s charmed by this manchild beside her. She’s done her research, she knows that he’s the flirtatious one, the ladykiller, he’s meant to be confident and cheeky and just dirty enough to shock little girls. But right now he looks like maybe he’s never even spoken to a woman. He looks at her like she’s glowing, and out of nowhere, she’s laughing at nothing. She’s laughing at everything. Harry can’t even get a sentence out without tripping over his words, and his bandmates are taunting him, and she’s not sure whether she wants to kiss him or ruffle his hair (she wants to kiss him). It’s flattering, she tells herself, it’s normal to be flattered. It’s nothing at all. He whispers to her behind his hand, shameless, in the middle of the interview, and Olly slants his eyes to her when she laughs. It’s like being caught by a teacher, and she bites the inside of her lip, feeling very young. But maybe not quite seventeen.

Later, when the band is long gone and Caroline is shrugging her coat on, a smirking assistant hands her a little white card – the card from the absurdly large bouquet Harry had given Olly, a joke on all three of them, but mostly on himself. It’s his number, of course, in boyishly round letters. She knows she should throw it out, or, even better, hand it back to the assistant to do it, but she puts it in her pocket instead. Isn’t it her business to be able to get in touch with famous people? It can’t hurt to have a direct line to a heartthrob, right? And if she texts him as soon as she gets outside ( _cheeky xx_ ), surely that’s just networking.

The next time she sees him is at a party, and he probably shouldn’t even be there ( _seventeen!_ ), but Lou has had a soft spot for him for ages and brings him along. She’s had two sugary drinks by the time they arrive, and if she feels a little thrill when she sees him, it’s easy to brush aside. And if her immediate decision to let him come to her makes her feel more than a little like a sixth-former, well, she’ll think about that later. She’s having fun.

A few minutes later, someone’s hand is resting on her shoulder, and she half turns to find him there, his grin open and confident enough to be a little irritating. “Have you missed me?” he asks, and she’s dimly aware of the fact that she had been in the middle of a conversation with one of her producers and her husband, so she only says, “Olly’s been _pining_ ,” and turns enough to slip out from under his hand and open up the circle to include him. Safety in numbers, and all that.

And that’s how the whole night goes, the two of them maneuvering around each other nonstop. Caroline’s had enough to drink that she flirts with him when he’s around, but not so much that she forgets to twirl away at every opportunity, to laugh at someone else’s joke, to work harder at talking to everyone in the room than she has since she was just starting out in this business. And for his part, Harry just keeps appearing at her side – never _too_ often, just enough so that half the jokes she’s laughing loudly at end up being his anyway, enough that by the end of the night she’s not sure whether to hug or pinch Lou for throwing him back into her orbit. She wonders vaguely if Lou knew what she was doing, or if she just thought her friend wanted a night out. Harry looks like he could be convincing, either way.

The party is winding down, her feet are killing her, her throat hurts a little bit from shouting over music, and Harry is still there. “Let me take you to dinner. You’ll like me,” he says suddenly, when she’s run out of people to keep between them, and she’s embarrassingly aware of the waiter behind him. He’s collecting dirty glasses on a tray, and he’s probably older than Harry. And he can definitely hear everything they’re saying. She knows she should say no, but instead she moves on – just brightly wishes him a good night and leaves. 

She texts him from the cab stand outside: her address, tomorrow night, 8 pm. Maybe it’s the drinks, maybe it’s the way he spent the night staring at her, maybe he’s just charmed her. She _does_ want to have dinner with him (but it doesn’t have to be somewhere where everyone can see her do it).

By the time he knocks on her door (right on time, of course, and she’s sure he’s been shuffling outside for a few minutes glaring at his watch), she’s talked herself out of canceling roughly thirty times. It’s too late then, of course, but when he holds up a bottle of wine and she has to wonder how he got his hands on it, she feels a special blend of humiliation and terror she hasn’t experienced in a while. Bluntness, she decides, is the only way to handle this. So:

“How did you get your hands on that?”

He shrugs – “Louis.” He looks a little nervous, but entirely unembarrassed, rather as if he hasn’t spent the last three and a half hours imagining increasingly tawdry Daily Mail headlines. It calms her a little, actually.

Two glasses of wine later, she’s staring at his hands on his chopsticks. His hands. Are huge. He’s talking about a radio interview the band did earlier that week, but she’s been in a frenzy all day, and now that she’s relaxed, she’s letting herself really notice him. There are no cameras on them, no producers or executives watching her, no other teenaged boys teasing either of them, so Harry’s talking, and Caroline’s watching him. She’s noticing the way he wraps his mouth around words, the way he pushes his hair off of his face, the way his long fingers twist his bracelets around his wrist when he’s thinking. His eyes are very green. His torso looks very long. She’s a little embarrassed by the thoughts running through her head.

He’s waving his chopsticks at her. “Caroline?”

She shakes her head a little, as if she could physically clear the notion of his mouth on her from her mind. “Hmm?”

“I said this is good – did you make it?”

She laughs. “God, no. I don’t cook.”

“I do,” he says, and he looks laughably proud – for the first time, she wonders if he’s given their age difference more than a second’s thought, because he looks as if he’s proven something: look, I am older than my years. Or maybe he’s just a really good cook. 

Before she can talk herself out of it, she says, “I guess you can make breakfast, then,” and Harry, who’s been perfectly at ease since sitting down, looks stunned. “I like pancakes,” she offers casually, before popping a piece of chicken into her mouth.

He does the dishes (of course he does the dishes). Charmed, she comes up behind him at the sink. Charmed, she makes a decision. Charmed, she slides her hand around his slender hip, and turns him around.

She barely registers the refrigerator door before he has her against it, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she’s making a mental note to lock up before she falls asleep, but mostly she’s focused on his hands, sliding up under her skirt and down into her tights. He’s impatient (he’s seventeen) and he’s clumsy, but she’s watched his hands all night, on forks and glasses and cab doors and his own hair, and when his fingers are inside her, she decides that she doesn’t care about delicacy. But then he stops, just does nothing, and she’s immediately very conscious of the fact that a teenager has his hand down her underwear.

“What’s wrong?” she manages to ask, suddenly awkward. Focusing resolutely on his left eyebrow, she thinks that maybe this revelation could have come twenty minutes earlier, maybe, before she’d propositioned him.

Harry groans and leans forward, drops his forehead onto her shoulder. “I don’t know what you want,” he says, and it’s quiet but unembarrassed and he’s seventeen and eager. “Tell me,” he whispers into her neck, his breath hot on her skin, his long fingers still but impossible to ignore. 

“Have you – have you done this before?” she asks, her breath catching mid-sentence. _Oh God_ , she thinks, _please let him say yes_. And he does, or at least, he nods, and in that moment, it’s like a switch has been flipped – she’ll teach him, and she won’t feel guilty about it.

His left hand is braced on the door behind her, and she reaches up and back for it, lacing her fingers through his. She can tell he’s holding his breath, and it’s sweet, because he’s been trying to act older than his years all night, but now he’s looking at her the way he did on _Xtra Factor_ , and isn’t that what reeled her in in the first place? Isn’t that the whole point of bringing home a teenager? She bites her lower lip and rocks her hips toward him, doing his job for him, setting a rhythm for him to pick up on. And of course he does, because he’s eager and she can see how badly he wants to please her, and he’s too pretty to have made it this far without fingering more than a couple of girls at parties. He’s not bad at it once he gets started, really, his fingers working steadily in and out of her, his thumb coming up to brush against her clit. It’s not enough, though, not for Caroline, who’s known how to get herself off since she was eleven, and who hasn’t had to deal with fumbling in a long while. She traces the length of his forearm, down his wrist into her knickers, and then her hand is over his and she’s showing him exactly where and how to touch her. She’s gotten impatient, and wants to be quick and efficient about it – maybe it’s not romantic, but she’s still got her back against her refrigerator and maybe this isn’t the time for romance. Anyway, she’s never had to be quite this bold with anyone; the sensation of someone else’s hands touching her exactly the way she’s touched herself so many times is strange and perfect, and she comes harder than she had expected, sagging against the door, breathing hard. 

Harry looks so pleased with himself that she can’t help laughing. She doesn’t remind him that she did more than half the work, but something about his satisfied expression is begging to be put in its place. She grasps his wrist and pulls his hand out of her tights – he’s not moving, just watching her – and wipes his fingers on his own shirt. He looks a little dumbfounded, and she’s surprised by how much it turns her on, watching him try to process it. She thinks about herself at 17, thinks about the sweet, desperate, earnest sex she had had with her boyfriend then. She’s not really looking for earnest tonight. 

Hands on buttons, she walks him backwards through her flat. Somewhere in the front hall he seems to wake back up, and by the time they make it to her couch, they’re both half-naked (it feels like a movie whenever she does this, the trail of clothes leading from the front door, the fingers crushed between bodies kissing, stumbling; she thinks she might have actually ripped one of his buttons off, and it only makes them both more aggressive). He bites her lip, harder than she might have expected from him, and she doesn’t bother stifling the moan it draws out of her. He pulls back a little, unsure, like maybe he’s done something wrong, and she laughs.

“It’s good,” is all she says. He’s catching on.

He kisses well ( _really_ well), and she can’t help but get distracted, let herself fall into it a little. She runs her hands up his sides, over his shoulders, up into his hair – and then she balls her hands and _pulls_. Harry hips jerk up violently, and she loses her balance a little, falling forward against his chest. They both stop, then, her fingers still tangled in his too-long hair.

“I’m not a kid,” she says into his neck. “I don’t want to just kiss on the couch.”

“But it’s fun,” he replies, tracing one long finger up and down her spine.

“Lots of things are fun.”

“So let’s do them all.”


End file.
